


Into the Woods

by crowleyshouseplant (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-02
Updated: 2011-11-02
Packaged: 2017-10-25 15:37:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claire looks for answers</p>
            </blockquote>





	Into the Woods

**Author's Note:**

> Rory made an unfortunate tag for one of her tumblr posts: #if somebody can write me castiel/consumed-by-an-obsession-with-deer-that-was-possibly-inherited-from-her-father-who-ultimately-followed-and-became-one-a-la-actaeon!claire I will actually weep. So I wrote them this as an anonymous submission.

She lives in the forest.

She lives in the forest naked except for the twigs in her hair, the dirt on her face, the bug bites welling on her calves, the salt grained in her skin. Her eyes are bright, never squinting in the sun so deep in the forest that the sky is green, patched with blue.

She watches him. She stays away from the wind so that the deer won’t smell her. She watches the buck bend his head and lap the water up, eyes bright and skittering, seeing shapes that the human eye can’t process, colors she distantly remembers from a time long ago when she had been so much more. Nose twitching at the air and she breaths deep, remembering when the air was in her pores and at her fingertips.

They say her father disappeared into a forest. They say that a river took him.

It wouldn’t have been the only thing that took him.

Claire thinks nobody knows anything.

Only the deer know.

Maybe not this particular deer, sating his thirst, with his cloven hoofs buried so deep in the dirt.

She relaxes into the underbrush, fingers loosely curled, content to simply watch, toes wriggling in the earth.

Her body’s a string, strung tight, quivering when she senses the approach. Not wind—wind is shifting molecules—but something else from somewhere else, something like energy perhaps, radiating, burning cells to glass still strung together with skin and hair and tissue.

Maybe something consuming and so inside of you that even when it’s gone, it’s like it never left.

 _I see you_ , Claire says, though she sees with the eyes stitched in her skin, lidded almost all the time, clouded with three dimensions, but not so blind for all of that.

She can’t touch her nose like the deer can—maybe if she could, she could find her way beyond deer and forest and tattered leaves fluttering in her footsteps—but she licks the air anyway. Tastes the molecules infused with the energy, tanging her tongue like battery acid.

She reaches out her hand, fingers tense, her weight shifting, whispering against fallen leaves.

The buck stiffens, turns, dashes away with a flick of his tail.

Claire follows after, tasting earth and all green things.


End file.
